In what sport can a player be deaf, blind, or semi-mobile? That's right, it's curling. Played on carefully prepared ice and involving sliding heavy, polished granite stones toward a target, curling has captivated audiences from its beginnings in medieval Scotland. This engaging book traces the sport's history and its enduring appeal, the highlights and lowlights, the superstars and eccentrics. Author Doug Clark covers every inch of curling, from Olympic near-scandals and lampooning by late-night talk hosts to tragedies like the death of nine players in the Windsor tornado.
A lighthearted, fact-filled guide to the roaring game: curling Immensely popular in Canada, curling has captured the hearts of millions of diehard enthusiasts around the world. Full of quirky characters, fascinating facts, intriguing history, and amazing trivia, this unique guide gives curlers (and lovers of the game) a colorful and often amusing look at this singular sport. With odd, funny factoids on every page, the book sheds light on the long-forgotten Downer Disc, a round curling broom, and how Charlie Kerr, a Brier curler of the '40s, was thwarted by the ash from his own cigar. This one-of-a-kind volume is the ultimate bonspiel prize for curling fans everywhere.Bob Weeks (Toronto, ON) is the editor of the Ontario Curling Report and the author of three books.
Scottish immigrants brought the game “across the pond†in the 18th century. Since then the roaring game has amassed its fair share of amusing and interesting stories, facts and anecdotes:• The flamboyant curling character Paul Gowsell once ordered a pizza to ice level during a match, briefly earning him the nickname “Pizza Paul†• Legendary Brier journalist Cactus Jack Wells turned down a Hockey Night in Canada play-by-play job in order to continue covering the Brier and Winnipeg Blue Bomber games• In 1912, the Mayflower Curling Club in Halifax served as a temporary morgue for recovered bodies in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster• In cashspiels, curlers win money, but in bonspiels, they win things like cars, T-bone steaks or new curling stones• Canada is said to be the only documented place where the iron curling “stone†was used• Before the 1988 Olympic Trials, the Canadian Curling Association informed the “The Wrench,†Ed Werenich, that he would have to lose weight if he qualified for the Olympics• Canada invited Scotland to tour Canada in a curling tournament in 1858, but didn't end up making the overseas journey until 44 years later in 1902• Curling did not become an official Olympic sport until 1998 in Nagano• In 2009, NBC will host a curling reality show called Rockstar Curling to determine who will represent the United States at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.And much more…
"This is the first football history to chronicle year by year how playing rules developed the game. Football - a four-dimensional game of rushing, kicking, forward passing, and backward passing - has had more playing rule changes since its inception than any other sport. The Anatomy of a Game follows football rules from the game's European roots through its beginning in the United States to its position as the number-one spectator sport in the 1990s. Highlighted are details of the crisis years that changed the character of the game, with coaches and rules committee members the featured players. David M. Nelson, who served on the NCAA Rules Committee longer than Walter Camp, provides personal insight into all Rules Committee meetings since 1958, as well as an appendix - chronological and by rule - listing every change since 1876." "Ever since the first two human beings kicked, threw, or batted an object competitively, there have been playing rules. Games are mentioned in the Bible, and the Romans brought football's forerunner to Britain, from where it was exported to the United States. It was in the United States that college students decided to make their game rugby rather than soccer. Although the students invented United States football and made the first rules, their ruling power was eventually lost to the faculty, administrators, coaches, rules committees, and the NCAA." "Beginning as a brutal sport, football survived several crises before and after the turn of the century, eventually becoming respectable. The 1931 injury crisis split the high school and college rules and the same year the professionals went their own way, with rules largely based on spectator appeal." "Today the sport is a national treasure primarily because of its playing rules, over seven hundred in total, which make college football unique among the world's team sports. Moreover, football remains an American game, never having the same impact in other countries as do baseball and basketball." "Rules make the game, but people make the rules. Football survived the major crises that threatened the game because committee members adhered to the precepts that had governed football since its inception. The game began with an attempt to have a consistent code of justice, personal accountability, and equality. In some sense the playing rules are a type of moral precept that explains in the simplest terms what can and cannot be done. The Football Code, which first prefaced the rules in 1916, makes the game - more than any other sport - a moral one because it sets standards for coaching, playing, sportsmanship, and officiating."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Covers the social, political, and economic history of the 1920s, including developments in science, from astrophysics to laboratory science to discoveries and inventions; the creation of new professional sports leagues; the labor union movement; censorship, and writers, artists, and moviemakers. This volume captures the complexities of the 1920s.
The first comprehensive history of squash in the United States, Squash incorporates every aspect of this increasingly popular sport: men's and women's play, juniors and intercollegiates, singles and doubles, hardball and softball, amateurs and professionals. Invented by English schoolboys in the 1850s, squash first came to the United States in 1884 when St. Paul's School in New Hampshire built four open-air courts. The game took hold in Philadelphia, where players founded the U.S. Squash Racquets Association in 1904, and became one of the primary pastimes of the nation's elite. Squash launched a U.S. Open in 1954, but its present boom started in the 1970s when commercial squash clubs took the sport public. In the 1980s a pro tour sprung up to offer tournaments on portable glass courts in dramatic locales such as the Winter Garden at the World Trade Center. James Zug, with access to private archives and interviews with hundreds of players, describes the riveting moments and sweeping historical trends that have shaped the game. He focuses on the biographies of legendary squash personalities: Eleo Sears, the Boston Brahmin who swam in the cold Atlantic before matches; Hashim Khan, the impish founder of the Khan dynasty; Victor Niederhoffer, the son of a Brooklyn cop; and Mark Talbott, a Grateful Dead groupie who traveled the pro circuit sleeping in the back of his pickup. A gripping cultural history, Squash is the book for which all aficionados of this fast-paced, exciting game have been waiting.
